The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) condemns the German authorities’ arrest of Carlos Puigdemont and demands his immediate release. The former regional president of Catalonia was arrested Sunday morning by German federal police officers on an autobahn in the state of Schleswig-Holstein and detained in a facility in the town of Neumünster. … Puigdemont has committed no crime, but is being pursued for purely political reasons … A comment in the Süddeutsche Zeitung entitled “Germany has its first political prisoner”, acknowledged that Madrid is attempting to “decimate a democratic mass movement with prisons and fines.” It is “obvious that the Spanish judiciary’s hardline stance is aimed at destroying the social and economic existence of the Catalan activists”: here.

Mr Puigdemont was being held in a prison in Neumuenster after his arrest on Sunday when he entered Germany on his way back from a trip to Finland to Belgium, where he has been holed up since he fled Spain in October.

EU rules state that member states must honour arrest warrants issued by other members — but they retain the right not to extradite people if the crimes they are accused of are not crimes in the state that detained them.

German courts will consider whether the Spanish crime of rebellion is equivalent to the German offence of high treason in order to determine whether it constitutes grounds for extradition.